Everyone's getting their knickers in a twist about the 47 percent that Mitt Romney figures are going to vote for Barack Obama, no matter what. But do you know why they will vote for Barack?

Wyatt Emmerich did the math back in 2010 for The Clevelend Current in Mississippi. It's been written up at ZeroHedge and by Kathy Shaidle.

The message is simple. Earn $3,600 per year as head of a family of three, and your net earnings (after taxes and government benefits) will amount to $31,630. But if you earn $60,000 a year, your net earnings will be $34,366. In other words, if you work your tail off and increase your earnings by $56,400, you will be only $2,736 ahead in take-home pay. The reason is that your government benefits will be cranked down from $30,762 a year to zero, and your taxes (including child care) will crank up from $2,787 a year to $25,634. Talk about chump change.

But I am not interested in the raw numbers; I am interested in the science behind the numbers. It is true that I never read "Science Tuesday" in The New York Times or listen to "Science Friday" on NPR, but I am still interested in science. In this case, of course, the science in question is economic science. It is the branch of economic science called "marginal economics" that came in ten years after Karl Marx nailed his colors to the labor theory of value in Capital.

Marginal economics solved the problem that had hag-ridden the classical economists. How could a jewel, that has high exchange value but low use value, be more valuable than a tractor that has low exchange value but high use value? The answer was that use value and exchange value are meaningless concepts.

Suppose I am a welfare recipient and I decide to earn some more money. What will be the bottom line? How much extra money will I take home if I earn more money? What is the marginal tax rate I will experience?

Something REALLY needs to happen. This “system” needs to be smashed, demolished, destroyed ....and then we need to just start over and build from the bottom up.

I for one, am tired of working so hard, giving up all MY free time in life to work hard and study, to be serious, to not fritter my time away ....while others just get it handed to them. Or to have limosuine liberals lecture me about how selfish and greedy I am. I feel like MY needs are continuously pushed aside, overlooked, and inconsequential.

I didn’t enslave ANYONE. I was just born here, in the 1960’s and have played by the rules and BELIEVED in this country — that if I worked hard and took the opportunities presented to me, that I might have half a chande to make it.

I never believed there were any guarantees. I realized LUCK had something to do with it also — but mostly just trying my best and tryind hard NOT to be a total douche bag would help. And it did.

Wow - thats a lot of incremental labor for no net income advantage. This message certainly needs getting out. The disincentive to labor up to $60k in earnings - that’s over the national median income for heavens sake.

And then when one of us says something like this, we are pilloried by the leftists for being “mean” and failing to have “compassion.” They trot out the example of someone who is obviously in need and unable to work and ignore the millions of examples of people who are simply unwilling to work.

12
posted on 09/25/2012 6:37:14 AM PDT
by generally
(Don't be stupid. We have politicians for that.)

She had a part-time job briefly, but every dollar she makes is essentially taxed at the same rate as if it were tacked onto the upper end of my salary.

We get more value from her staying home and managing the household than we get from her working, unless she were to get a fulltime job with a good salary - and that has it’s own set of costs/benefits - another car, less time for meal prep, laundry, etc., plus the stress. We save more by her making all the meals, packing my lunches, and growing veggies than we would gain from her working instead.

We’re both healthier and happier and she works just as hard at home as I do at work, if not harder.

If you aren't already maxing out your 401(k) and IRA contributions, then I'll suggest that you reconsider.

Before I was married, I did pretty well with a decent salary and investment income. After we was married, I noted the same problem: her income was taxed at my highest marginal rate.

We maxed out everything that gives us any tax benefits: 401(k)/403(b) contributions, FSA/HSA contributions, etc. If we are under the income limit, we also make Roth IRA contributions for each of us.

This substantially reduced the tax bite. Our take-home income is about the same, but we will get a lot of additional benefits in the long run.

I realize that a part-time job typically won't allow her to make 401(k) or HSA contributions. But, she CAN make an IRA contribution (Roth or traditional). If you can invest that additional money in long-term plans without making too many sacrifices now, you'll come out ahead.

14
posted on 09/25/2012 6:58:38 AM PDT
by justlurking
(The only remedy for a bad guy with a gun is a good WOMAN (Sgt. Kimberly Munley) with a gun)

Thanks for the tip. We’re already maxed out on the HSA and my 401(k), but the IRA is something I should look into if we can swing it.

We had a bunch of one-time out-of-pocket medical expenses in 2012. I’m hoping they will hit the ridiculously high threshhold where I can deduct some of them and that will give us a little extra $ that we could put away.

I'm not sure of the rules about an IRA. If you have a 401(k), I don't know if your wife can make a deductible contribution to an IRA (so you don't pay taxes on it now).

But if she can only make a non-deductible contribution to an IRA, here's a neat little trick. Check with your accountant to make sure it is done right:

This only works if she doesn't already have a traditional IRA.

If your AGI is over $177,000 (think that's the limit), you can't make a full contribution to a Roth IRA.

But, she can make a non-deductible $5000 contribution to a traditional IRA.

Immediately re-characterize the traditional IRA into a Roth IRA. Since it was all non-deductible contributions, you don't pay any additional taxes.

All future returns on the Roth IRA are tax-free. If you leave it in the traditional IRA, you'll have to calculate the basis of the non-deductible contributions every time you withdraw from it, to figure out how much tax to owe.

16
posted on 09/25/2012 7:30:22 AM PDT
by justlurking
(The only remedy for a bad guy with a gun is a good WOMAN (Sgt. Kimberly Munley) with a gun)

In other words, if you work your tail off and increase your earnings by $56,400, you will be only $2,736 ahead in take-home pay.

I was a product development engineer. I had a record of two smash successes in a row, making millions in profits and saving (along with my chemist compatriot) a $100 million division of a Fortune 200 company. In 1995 all they were paying me was about $85K. After Federal and California State taxes, the day care bill, the private school bill, the extra car, gas, etc, after working 90 hour weeks, living 25% of my time overseas, watching my poor wife deal with two young children while holding a job, watching the kids' behavior deteriorate under all the stress and BS that came from the school... I was making a net profit of about $10K.

We pulled the kids from school and I quit my job to write a book. I told the wife that if we produced outstanding kids as a result we'd be money ahead from the scholarships and that is exactly what happened. We're sending two girls to college now for about $10K per year beyond what it cost us to have them at home. They will graduate from Stanford and Utah State with no debt.

Had I stayed at work I have little doubt that I would have seen much of that money disappear into medical bills, possibly a shrink or a divorce lawyer, goodness only knows but they'd have almost all been Democrats.

My dad did it the usual way. While I was growing up, we'd moved 16 times and my family had endured three divorces. He lost three houses and ended up a bitter and broken man. Nobody in the family has recovered from it.

In return for quitting, I had the great privilege of raising my children to be wonderful people. They were born, raised, and went to college from the same house. I had the great privilege of research and discovery. It has been hard, but in my judgment it was worth it.

Meanwhile, I've written a second book, patented a free market environmental management system, and made important discoveries or developments in three distinct career fields. Don't know where it will lead, but it sure as hell was better than workings.

“The conversation came up at tax season with our estate attorney that we might consider a “legal divorce” in order to reduce tax basis by filing separately.

Pretty damn sad when that conversation comes up.”

Years ago during the Clintoon years before Newt rammed the tax decreases through, we were maxed out on our 401’s, HSA’s and IRA’s. I had an excellent sales the year before with an excellent bonus paid that year. My wife had gotten a good raise. So our Income had really ballooned up from previous years.

In December we got a call from our CPA, a lady who, also, went to our church, whom we had known for decades. She suggested that we fly to a quickie divorce country and get a divorce for tax reasons. My wife didn’t speak to her for a couple of months. We didn’t fly and divorce.

Flash forward a couple of years, and my company offered me an excellent retirement. The retirement income came in a bundle in Jan the next year. Thanks to the Clintoon’s tax policy, I couldn’t buy into the company 401K and could fund an IRA for the measly 2 k maximum. The Max of FICA and Medicare were deducted from the lumpsum with the estimated taxes for that coming year.

After looking over the offer and crunching the numbers, the same accountant called us in at the end of the year and told us that I should not work at all the first year as we were going to be killed with what she call Hilliarly’s tax policies which handled that retirement like a sales bonus. She said that we would probably have borrow from our 401K to help pay for the extra taxes that year. Fortunately, somehow the company had its 401k that allowed withdrawals at age 55 if we were retired. I was 56, and we did borrow to pay for the taxes. I didn’t work that year, and my wife didn’t speak to our friend for a few weeks again.

23
posted on 09/25/2012 9:15:09 AM PDT
by Grampa Dave
(We are the 53%, who pay taxes and keep this country going inspite of the 47% rat moochers!)

I’m not sure where this person got his numbers, but first of all you have to assume that if he’s making gross of 60k he’s not contributing to retirement or healthcare costs and he also must not be taking any deductions what so ever. He apparently isn’t taking advantage of the child tax credit or their deductions and also would seem to be self employed.

Basically that’s a self employed guy not taking advantage of anything the tax code gives him. Quite frankly it’s just my argument for why the tax code is jacked up. You deduct enough benefits like 401k, IRA, Health insurance, etc., to allow for you to limit your income quite a bit, then you can get to a point where you can get the Earned Income Tax Credit and pay even less. I would guess that a family making 50,000 a year working for an employer that offers direct benefits would probably get a tax refund and essentially pay zero in income taxes(and it’s possible to get money back), oh yeah just through taxes you can get 6k-7k returns when you earned only 20k a year. I would bet that there would be larger families say with 5 or 6 kids that could easily zero out income taxes at maybe even 80k a year. Sure on payroll taxes you have to pony up but income taxes are essentially non existant on middle income families.

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